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Reform Conservatism and Immigration

June 23, 2014 4:30 pmJune 23, 2014 4:30 pm

This will hopefully be the week in which I settle all family business — by which I mean that I intend to write the responses to liberal critics of “reform conservatism” than I’ve been promising since long before World Cup season. Having discussed immigration policy in yesterday’s column, I’ll start with that issue, and with William Galston’s Wall Street Journal essay from late last month, which offered praise for the recent reformocon manifesto “Room to Grow” but also suggested that reform conservatives were too often coloring “within the lines” — and in particular, that “if immigration is to today’s Republicans as welfare was to the Democrats of the early 1990s, someone will have to go further.”

This perspective is common to many intelligent observers — that for reasons substantive and political alike, any renovation of the Republican policy agenda simply has to start with comprehensive immigration reform. And so the fact that the immigration issue isn’t the place where reform conservatives tend to begin does require an explanation.

But I don’t think it’s the explanation that Galston’s parting shot suggests — that reformocons are too cautious, too careful about transgressing party orthodoxy, too conscious of the dangers of coloring outside the G.O.P.’s existing lines. In certain ways, it’s the opposite. Since the 2012 election, especially, immigration reform has often been championed by voices within the Republican Party (be they donors, consultants, or pundits) who see its passage as a simple, one-step substitute for outside-the-lines thinking on economic policy, and reform conservatives have resisted this idea precisely because they/we think the party’s domestic agenda needs a more (if you will) comprehensive overhaul. That is, in intra-party debates sweeping immigration legislation is often cast as the “one cool trick” that will solve all of the G.O.P.’s woes, and it’s been the so-called reformers who have been most likely to say that no, it isn’t so, much more needs to be done.

This issue alone, of course, is not sufficient reason to oppose a comprehensive bill flat-out, and indeed I know that some of the authors in the “Room to Grow” manifesto support one. But there are further issues, besides just internal G.O.P. politicking, that make some reformers (myself of course included) doubtful about Galston’s analogy to the New Democrats and welfare weform. For one thing, as I’ve argued before, the politics of immigration for today’s G.O.P. are a lot thornier and potentially no-win than were the politics of welfare for Clinton Democrats: As much as the issue may be hurting the Republican Party now, it’s very easy — based on past results and plausible futures — to sketch out a scenario in which passing a comprehensive reform actually ends up making the G.O.P.’s political situation worse. And then the issue is also of low salience to most voters, and of lower salience to Hispanics than many analysts assume, so it’s at least possible to imagine ways that Republicans might right themselves without signing on to a comprehensive bill … and to imagine, as well, policy alternatives that the party might champion that aren’t just “self-deportation.”

Then the deeper issue, the deeper difference between welfare then and immigration now, is that whereas the policy objective being sought by welfare reform was deeply congruent with the larger New Democrat project (which was about proving that the welfare state could reward work and responsibility, re-establishing government’s legitimacy in the face of right-wing criticism, and putting liberalism more clearly on the side of taxpayers and wage earners), the policy consequences of immigration reform might well cut against the larger aim that reform conservatives are seeking. I’ve made this point before at greater length, so here I’ll just put it like this: At heart, the reform project is an attempt to craft a right-of-center, limited-government response to the mounting problems of middle-down America — stagnant pay, weaker-than-ideal mobility, and social and familial breakdown. There is evidence — not unanswerable, but real — that mass low-skilled immigration might be making these problems worse. And there are good reasons to think that a comprehensive reform along the lines sought by both parties’ leadership would (through guest-worker programs and the incentives created by any amnesty) increase low-skilled immigration above its already-substantial levels. So even if supporting such legislation were a silver bullet for all the Republican Party’s political problems, reform conservatives who care more about their movement’s policy objectives than the G.O.P.’s electoral fortunes would still have sound reasons to be skeptical.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.